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local communities | MIT Center for Civic Media

People in local geographic areas may need help communicating with each other in order to collaborate in building and sustaining healthy communities. Grassroots action at any level - neighborhoods, towns, or cities - can help improve local services, welcome newcomers, and develop cultural, economic and political capital.

One of the hardest lessons and ongoing challenges in digital disaster and humanitarian response is how to connect with a local population. While many digital response groups deal with this by waiting for official actors (like the affected nation's government, or the United Nations) to activate them, this doesn't always sit well with my political viewpoints. Some of these affected nations have governments which are not in power at the consent of the governed, and so to require their permission rankles my soul. But to jump in without request or context is also unacceptable. So what's to be done? It's from this perspective that I've been diving into how civics, disaster, and humanitarian tech overlap. And it's from this perspective that I've been showing up to Bayview meetings for San Francisco city government's Empowered Communities Program. ECP is working to create neighborhood hubs populated by members already active in their communities.

Genetics

How do you innovate in a field of massive potential and risk? When it comes to genetically engineering living things, most of the technology being developed happens behind closed doors. How do we change the perception of science and genetic engineering with an emphasis on openness for the sake of safety, ethics, and cautionary vigilance but continue to move forward? Who should be responsible for making “god-like” decisions that will ultimately affect our entire future as a society? Megan Palmer, Senior Research Scholar, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University was our moderator.

What does civic innovation look like in México? There are efforts across the nation to build skills, interest, and capacity for civic technology. Last week I contributed to these by facilitating a workshop for youth in Mérida, Mexico on the topic of Civic Innovation. It was organized and hosted at the amazing Workshop school, just outside of town, with the help of my colleague and friend Alberto Muñoz. Their student-led, collaborative approach to learning was inspired by the Reggio-Emilia style; reminding me of my roots in the Lifelong Kindergarten group. It provided the perfect setting for this hackathon-style workshop to help youth learn about how to apply their technological and creative skills towards the public good. The participants ranged from 6th grade, to graduate school; a great mix of skills and interests.

This past March, 3,500 students walked out of Boston Public Schools (BPS) in a well organized action to protest a proposed $50 million budget cut to BPS which would result in the closure of schools, layoff of teachers, and diminished services in extracurricular spaces, AP classes and support for special-needs students. Young organizers began to mobilize weeks prior, beginning when a group of students reached out to the youth-led Boston Area Youth Organizing Project. In an interview published last week in The Nation, young organizers from the movement expressed pleasant surprise with the number of youth who participated, articulated the process of organizing the walkout as well as the disastrous effects such budget cuts would have on the lives of young people throughout Boston and made sophisticated links between budget policies and institutional racism.

Bustling into Clover in Harvard Sq. in the early evening of November 3rd and scanning the faces there, you probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. Maybe, if you’d been looking for it, you would have noticed a rather expansive gaggle of people on the central downstairs table. You might have even bothered to ponder why the gaggle was gathered so tightly despite the surrounding spare seats - but you probably wouldn’t have.

The members of the Boston Cooperative Investment Club do not immediately strike one as strange. Yet, if you talk to them, you realise that what they’re doing is quite extraordinary. The twenty or so people gathered round the table were all there as members, officers or interested parties of the BCIC, a club that raises money to invest in cooperatives and, as they say on their website, ‘organizations and associations that support cooperatives’.

I came on with Aspiration back in January as the Community Leadership Strategist, to merge the work I've been doing in the humanitarian and disaster response space with Aspiration's practices and team. It's been a *blast* so far, and continues to be.